ABSTRACT
The reform of the approach to state regulation of health and safety had its foundation in the 1972 report of the Robens Committee of Inquiry (Robens, 1972). The committee was established by government in 1970 to examine the reasons for a perceived failure of state regulation to fulfil the expectations of society with regard to the health and safety performance of industry. The perception was based on a number of features of the industrial sector in the late 1960s:
health and safety performance appeared to have reached a plateau in terms of recorded incidences of accidents and ill health;
rapid technological developments and the increasing scale and complexity of industry were imposing unsustainable burdens on the legislative machinery of the state;
the responsibilities of the many different actors in the system were not clearly distinguished;
the vulnerability of the public to risks from industrial activities was increasingly demonstrated in incidents both in the UK and abroad; and
there were particular worries about the hazards of toxic and dangerous substances and the inadequacy of the traditional approach to their control.
